Category Archives: John

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Loyal to the death—John 13:34-35

When Jesus commands us to love one another as he has loved us, why does he call this a “new” commandment (13:34)? Did not God command all believers to love one another already in the Old Testament (Lev 19:18). What makes this commandment a new commandment is the new example set by the Lord Jesus.

The immediate context makes this example clearer. Jesus takes the role of a humble servant by washing his disciples’ feet (13:1-11)—a role normally performed by servants or those adopting their posture. Then Jesus calls on his disciples to imitate his servanthood (13:12-17). In the same context, we understand the degree to which he became a servant for us by noting what he would suffer: Jesus and the narrator keep talking about Jesus’ impending betrayal (13:11, 18-30). Jesus explains that he is being “glorified” (13:31-32), i.e., killed (12:23-24); he is about to leave the disciples (13:33), and Peter is not yet spiritually prepared to follow Jesus in martyrdom (13:36-38).

This is the context of loving one another “as” Jesus loved us. We are called to sacrifice even our lives for one another! As 1 John 3:16 puts it explicitly (my paraphrase), “This is how we recognize love: He laid down his life on our behalf. [In the same way], we also owe it to him to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters in Christ.” The next verse (1 John 3:17) suggests that if we can lay down our lives for one another, certainly we can seek to meet one another’s needs in less demanding ways.

The rest of the Gospel of John illustrates more fully Jesus’ example of love and servanthood, which culminate in the cross.

In many places in the world our brothers and sisters are suffering. Indeed, many even near us may be hurting. What would Jesus do? Now that his Spirit is active within us (John 14:23), what would he have us do?

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The devil in the details–Satan in the Gospels

Christianity Today recently invited Craig to write an article addressing the deletion of the devil from the new Son of God movie, but also explaining Satan’s role in the Gospels. With the help of a CT editor, Craig contributed the article at the link below.

Satan does play a key role in the Gospels, where he is mentioned more than 30 times and is described performing various activities. These passages help us to better understand Christ’s mission, the challenges we face, and the reality in which we live.

The full article is now online at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/february-web-only/casting-out-devil.html

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In God’s presence—John 14—16

Some of us feel that we have to earn our way into God’s presence when we pray—that somehow if we pray a certain way or for a particular length of time, God will start hearing us. Some even think that we lack access to God’s presence until Jesus’s return. When Jesus sent his disciples to the world, however, he equipped them with his Spirit (John 20:21-23). This is the same Spirit he had explained to them earlier, who would continue Jesus’ presence among them (John 14:2-23) and in the world (16:7-11).

Jesus begins hinting at this even before he becomes fully explicit. We typically quote John 14:2-3 as if it referred only to Jesus’ future coming: “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places … I will come again and take you to myself.” But as wonderful as our future hope is, Jesus intended something more than this here. The Father’s house is the place in his presence, and we do not belong to it only in the future. The only “coming” Jesus explicitly refers to in this context is his return to them after the resurrection to give them his Spirit (14:16-19, 23), a promise fulfilled in 20:19-23. The Greek term for “dwelling places” in 14:2 occurs in only one other text in the Bible—later in this very conversation (14:23), where Jesus and the Father will make their “dwelling place” within the believer.

If such an understanding seems difficult to us, we should remember that it was no less difficult for the first disciples. Jesus promised to prepare them a place in the Father’s presence, where he was going (14:2-4), but they protested that they knew neither where he was going nor how to get there (14:5). Jesus replied that where he was going was to the Father, and they would get there by coming through him (14:6). Today we understand that we do not have to wait for Jesus’ future return to come to the Father through Jesus; we come to him by faith when we accept him as our Lord and Savior.

In other words, we enter the Father’s presence at the moment of our conversion. Whether or not one recognizes that 14:2-3 speak of present experience, certainly 14:17 and 23 do: the Father, Son and Spirit come to make their dwelling place in believers. This means that, if you have surrendered your life to Jesus, you are in his presence this very moment. The same Jesus who taught and healed in Galilee, who washed his disciples’ feet, who died for our sins and rose from the dead, is with you right now as you are reading this article. He is with you every moment of every day, living inside you and eager to teach you his ways.

But the Spirit not only mediates Jesus’ presence to us; the Spirit also mediates Jesus’ presence to the world. Just as Jesus convicted the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment during his earthly ministry, the Spirit will continue to do so by presenting Jesus to the world (John 16:8-11). But the text also suggests that the Spirit will work especially through Jesus’ followers even to mediate Jesus’ presence to the world (15:26-27). Jesus promised to send the Spirit not to the world, but to believers (16:7); through our testimony of Jesus the Spirit would convict the world by confronting them with the presence of Jesus himself (16:8-11). Because Jesus lives inside us, we can be confident that when we live his ways and share his message, God himself will touch the hearts of the people we share with.

This is adapted from an article Craig wrote in 2004; Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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Knowing the Shepherd—John 9—10

Today as we seek to walk intimately with our Lord, we can remember an occasion in the Gospel of John where Jesus talked about knowing him. Although Jesus addressed one situation, the principles in John 9—10 apply to believers in all cultures.

When Jesus heals a man from blindness on a mandatory day of rest, some religious leaders expel the man from their community for following Jesus. Jesus then confronts these leaders in John 9:40—10:18, explaining that those who were truly Jesus’s sheep—like this formerly blind man—hear his voice. By contrast, those who try to lord it over the sheep however they see fit—like these religious leaders—are like thieves, robbers or wolves, who come to devour the sheep (John 10:1, 5, 8, 10, 12). Jesus is the good shepherd, who will lay down his life for the sheep to protect them from the robbers and wolves (10:11).

Hearers who knew the Bible well should have understood what Jesus was implying here. In Israel’s Scriptures, God is the chief shepherd, and his people Israel are his sheep; ungodly leaders who exploit the sheep would stand under God’s judgment (Ezek 34; Jer 23:1-4). It does not matter whether the religious leaders have kicked the healed man out of their religious community. The rightful shepherd declares that the healed man belongs to his sheep, i.e., is one of his people! Most scholars today believe that many members of John’s own audience had been kicked out of their religious communities for following Jesus. John recounts these earlier events about Jesus to encourage his audience that what matters is not the approval of people but the approval of the Lord himself.

The religious leaders, sure of their learning and piety, reject the faith of the man they think had been “born in sin” (John 9:34). By meeting Jesus, however, the blind man enters a relationship much more important than any of the elite members of his people could have offered him. Jesus insists that his own sheep will follow him because they know his voice, the way sheep normally follow only their own shepherds (John 10:3-4); they will not follow the voice of strangers (10:5).

Then Jesus offers an extraordinary claim: his own sheep know him “just as” he and the Father know each other (10:14-15). The same kind of intimacy that the Father has with the Son is the kind of intimacy Jesus wants us to have with him. (John illustrates this elsewhere; for example, the same Greek term is used for Jesus’ intimate position with his Father in 1:18 and for the beloved disciple’s intimate position with Jesus in the banquet in 13:23.)

Jesus was intimate with his disciples. In ancient literature, someone who shared the deepest confidences of his or her heart was a true friend; Jesus shared with his disciples whatever he heard from his Father (John 15:15). But this relationship did not vanish when Jesus ascended to the Father; he promised the Spirit, so that whatever the Spirit hears from Jesus, he will continue to make known to us (John 16:13-15). This means that we can be just as intimate with Jesus as, and experience his presence no less fully than, the disciples he walked with 2000 years ago. When we embrace Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we begin a new life of relationship with him.

Like the formerly blind man, we have entered into a relationship that matters more than what anyone else thinks of us. We may be lowly or despised in the eyes of others. But in prayer and a life of faith, led by God’s Spirit, we commune with the king of all kings. His sheep still know his voice, and we continue growing to know his voice better through studying Scripture and walking daily with him.

Perhaps thirty-five years ago, soon after my conversion from atheism, I had an unexpected experience. Reading my Bible day after day, I longed to hear God like the people in the Bible did, but I did not know that it was possible. One day the longing was so intense, and yet the Spirit sparked faith in my heart to trust God to open my ears to hear his voice. What I heard was the deepest love and kindness I had ever experienced, a love that I had never before known, a love that I yearned to reciprocate by devoting myself wholly to God’s will. Each day I was eager to spend more time learning his heart. I have not heard God as clearly in every season of my life as I did in seasons like that one, but he is eager to share his heart with us. Jesus touched me, as he touched the blind man in John 9. May we all cry out to the Savior to open our ears to hear his precious heart more and more!

Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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The Spirit in John 7:37-39

When Jesus commissioned his followers, he declared, “I send you just the same way the Father sent me” (John 20:21), and empowered them by giving them the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). As Jesus’ followers today, we share the same commission to let the world know about the Lord; we also must depend on the same power of the Spirit that Jesus gave his disciples.

When one reads accounts of frontier revivals in the early nineteenth century, or spectacular “people movements” in overseas missions, one is quickly struck by how much of the success was driven simply by the uncontrollable activity of the Spirit. People prayed and labored in faith, but after they had proved their faithfulness, God accomplished miraculously far beyond what human effort could have done. If this were not true, there would be no church in the world today! And since it is true, we should seek God with the same expectancy to accomplish his purposes today.

One passage in John’s Gospel that talks about the Spirit is John 7:37-39. Here Jesus promises rivers of living water to those who believe in him; we begin to drink at the moment we first believe, but we may continue to drink and experience God’s powerful presence throughout our Christian life. (The Spirit is the foretaste of our promised future in glory; Rom 8:23; 2 Cor 5:5.)

Most scholars believe that John wrote to Jewish believers in Jesus kicked out of some of their local Jewish communities for following Jesus as their divine Lord. Thus he often contrasts the true experience of the Spirit with mere ritual. Jesus offers a baptism in the Spirit greater than John’s baptism in water (1:31-33); he values a friend’s desperate situation at his wedding more than the traditional demands of ritual water pots (2:6); he offers living water within the believer, better than Jacob’s well precious to the Samaritans (4:12-14). Jewish teachers could envision Gentiles converting to Judaism through baptism as being “reborn” into Judaism; Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born from the water of the Spirit (3:3-6). Jesus rather than the healing waters of a pool healed a paralytic (5:5-9), and the Siloam pool helped a blind man only because Jesus sent him there (9:7).

Priests used the waters of the Pool of Siloam in a special ritual during the Feast of Tabernacles. After a public procession, they poured water from that pool out at the base of the altar, symbolically reenacting an expectation in Scriptures they read on the last day of that feast: rivers of living water would someday flow from God’s temple (Ezek 47:1-12; Zech 14:8). On the last day of this festival, Jesus declares, “If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me! Let them drink, whoever believes in me!” Then he refers to the very Scripture that was read on that day: rivers of water would flow from the “belly”; Jewish people considered the temple the navel of the earth. Jesus is saying, “I am the foundation stone of God’s new temple! Let the one who wills come and drink freely!” The water of which he spoke was the Holy Spirit, and would be available once Jesus was glorified (Jn 7:39).

John later explains that Jesus was glorified in part by being crucified (John 12:23-24; this echoes the Greek translation of Isa 52:13). Jesus was glorified by being lifted up on the cross, crowned with thorns and hailed “King of the Jews.” When a soldier pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, “blood and water” flowed out (19:34). The spear undoubtedly ruptured the sac around Jesus’ heart, which contained not only blood but a watery substance, but it is not hard to guess why John, alone of all the Gospels, makes a point of mentioning it. Once lifted up on the cross, Jesus offered eternal life to all. We should depend fully on this gift of the Holy Spirit he paid such a great price to provide for us.

Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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Beholding his glory—John 1:14

When John declares, “we beheld his glory” (John 1:14), he is making an eyewitness claim that is echoed later in the Gospel (19:35; 21:24). But he is also suggesting something about the character of testimony he is giving. Like Moses, Isaiah, and others, John beheld a theophany, a revelation of God’s glory. Instead of this revelation coming as a single visionary event, however, it came in the flesh, in the entire life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Some Greeks spoke about a pure, heavenly realm that could be envisioned only by the pure mind, freed from earthly constraints. John’s Gospel uses similar language, but points out that no one has truly seen or revealed heavenly things except Jesus, the man from heaven (3:11-13). Some, however, have seen a foretaste of heaven in Jesus, a point the Gospel regularly emphasizes and grounds in the Old Testament.

In 1:14-18, John evokes Moses’s vision of God. When God revealed his “glory” to Moses, it was “full of grace and truth” (Exod 34:6); no one could see God fully, however (Exod 33:20), so Moses saw only part of God’s glory (Exod 33:23). But when Jesus came in the flesh, God unveiled his full glory; John says, “we beheld his glory … full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). John goes on to declare that no one has seen God, but that now Jesus, who is perfectly intimate with the Father, has revealed him (John 1:18).

Likewise, Abraham rejoiced to see Jesus’s day (John 8:56). When Jesus announced this, his hearers were scandalized: Abraham died perhaps sixteen or more centuries earlier, and Jesus was not yet fifty years old (8:57)! But Jesus spoke of Abraham’s encounters with God, such as when Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness (Gen 15:1-21). “Before Abraham was,” Jesus responded, “I already am” (John 8:58).

Yet John complains that Jesus’s contemporaries were too blind to “see” and perceive who he really was, just like the prophet Isaiah warned (John 12:40, quoting Isa 6:10). Isaiah had this revelation, John adds, when Isaiah “saw his glory” (John 12:41). That is, the theophany that Isaiah experienced in Isa 6:1-10 was a revelation of Jesus himself! In this Gospel, Jesus emphasizes that seeing him is the same as seeing the Father (John 14:7-9); the works he did revealed that they shared the same nature (John 14:10-11). In a much lesser sense, he has given us the same works to carry on, to draw attention to himself and his Father (John 14:12-13).

The first epistle of John offers a theological lesson from these truths: Those who have “seen” Jesus by conversion and continue to recognize his glory in the present will be ready to see him unashamed when he returns (1 John 3:2-3, 6). Philosophers thought that meditating on the divine transformed a person to be like the divine; John shows that instead of some abstract conception of the “divine,” we can know God personally in Jesus Christ. Just like Moses reflected God’s glory the more he saw it, knowing Jesus transforms us to be like him (1 John 3:3).

Now that Jesus has gone to the Father, how can the world see him? A good start would be learning to love one another. No one has seen God, 1 John 4:12 emphasizes, but if we love one another (i.e., as he loved us), God dwells in us. How do we carry on Jesus’ mission in the world today? Jesus said that our love for one another is how the world will recognize that we are his disciples (John 13:35), and our unity is how they will recognize that the Father sent Jesus (17:23).

Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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As the Father sent me, I send you—John 20:21

What dynamic empowered the earliest church for mission? When Jesus came to his disciples after his resurrection, they were hiding, afraid that they might meet their teacher’s fate (John 20:19). Jesus greeted them with the typical Jewish greeting (the blessing shalom, 20:19, 21). It was more than a greeting that evening, however: it fulfilled his promise to bring them peace (14:27).

Jesus then showed them his hands and side (20:20). Soldiers often displayed their wounds to prove their loyalty; others displayed wounds to evoke sympathy. Jesus may have displayed his wounds to demonstrate that he had in fact died, hence was in fact risen (cf. Luke 23:39-40). This would make sense to the disciples, since some Jewish thinkers expected God to resurrect the bodies of the righteous in the same form in which they died before healing them. When they saw him, the disciples rejoiced: his coming fulfilled his promise to bring them joy (John 16:20-22).

Now the Lord commissioned them. “As the Father sent me,” he announced, “that is how I send you” (20:21). How had the Father sent Jesus? He sent him as his agent and representative, to reveal by both his words and life the Father’s heart for the world. As the Father’s agent, he did what the Father would have done and said what the Father would have said (5:19). As the Father’s agent, he bore the Father’s authority to perform selected signs revealing God’s character. And as the Father’s agent, he was so one with the Father’s mission that he would die to carry it out.

Jesus passes this commission on to his followers. We are his agents and representatives: we must speak his message, and our lives must let the world know that we are truly his disciples (13:35). He authorizes us to speak the message that brings people life or judgment, depending on their response (20:23). But how can we fulfill such a dramatic commission?

Jesus granted his disciples the power to carry out his commission in 20:22. As God first breathed into Adam the breath of life (Gen 2:7), Jesus breathed on them new life. He had earlier promised Nicodemus that those who were born again would be born from the Spirit, who was as mysterious as the wind (John 3:8). Now he declared, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This was the Spirit that Jewish people associated sometimes with spiritual cleansing and often with prophetic empowerment. This was the Spirit that Jesus had promised would continue his own presence among them (14:26; 16:13-15). The Spirit was Jesus’s agent as Jesus was the Father’s agent (16:14), and the Spirit had come to live in the believers.

How can we dare to attempt to fulfill God’s mission? We must trust him and the power with which he has equipped us. As we faithfully speak and live his mission, the Spirit will make Jesus real to those whose hearts God opens. Jesus made not some but all of his followers like the prophets of old; he has called us to let the world know his heart of love.

This article is adapted from an article written for the Missionary Seer in 2004; Craig has also written The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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Born from water and the Spirit—John 3:3-5

When Nicodemus, himself a religious teacher, praised Jesus as a great teacher, Jesus revealed himself as more than a teacher. Jesus is a savior, and he confronts this religious teacher with his need for salvation. “You must be born from above,” Jesus told him (John 3:3). The Greek word for “above” can also mean, “again,” and Nicodemus supposes that Jesus asks him to enter his mother’s womb again (3:4). So Jesus explains further: “You must be born from water and the Spirit” (3:5).

 

Not only Nicodemus, but a host of interpreters through history, have wondered what Jesus meant. What Jesus most naturally meant in light of first-century culture Nicodemus assumed that he could not mean! When Gentiles converted to Judaism, they normally ritually immersed themselves to wash away their former Gentile impurities. According to later Jewish teachers, once a Gentile converted to Judaism they were like a newborn child, having forsaken their previous people and lifestyle and now serving the God of Israel. Had Jesus told a Gentile to be “born of water,” Nicodemus could have guessed what he meant. But he could hardly imagine that Jesus would demand the same of him, a religious Jewish teacher descended from Abraham!

 

Yet this is likely precisely Jesus’ point. We are not saved by our ethnicity or because we grew up in church; we are not saved even by our religious deeds. We are saved because Jesus died for us (John 3:16) and rose again. Jesus was telling Nicodemus that he had to come to God on the same terms that Gentiles did, the same terms that we all do: he had to accept God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Later, in John 8:44, Jesus argues that people who have sinned (everyone) are children of the devil, following his nature; when Jesus comes into our lives, however, we get a new nature and are born from God. We may not start off by living out that new nature perfectly, but at least we are aware that we have a new Lord.

 

But why does Jesus add, “born from the Spirit”? As Calvin and others have suggested, the Greek phrase here translated, “water and the Spirit,” may be what is called a hendiadys, using the conjunction epexegetically. In other words, we might translate it, “born from the water of the Spirit.” Jesus uses “water” as a symbol for the Spirit in John’s Gospel (John 7:37-39). Thus he is telling Nicodemus not that he will be saved by Jewish ritual immersion, but that he will be saved instead by a spiritual baptism by the Spirit, i.e., by the gift of God’s Spirit transforming his heart. All those who embrace Christ as savior become God’s children (John 1:12-13).

 

Jesus probably alludes in this context to the restoration promise of Ezekiel 36:25-27: God would sprinkle clean water on his people, put a new spirit in them, and give them his own Spirit. Thus, Jesus speaks of the spirit that is born from the Spirit (John 3:6). He goes on to compare God’s life-giving Spirit with the wind (3:8), just as in Ezekiel’s next chapter (Ezek 37:1-14).

 

God does not save us because we are Jewish or Gentile; God loves the entire world, including all peoples and cultures (John 3:16). All of us have sinned and left God’s way, but when we accept and trust the gift of God’s Son, he welcomes each of us as his children. May we labor until all know about him.

 

This is adapted from Craig’s 2005 article in the Missionary Seer; Craig has also authored The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic), which received an award of merit in the Christianity Today book awards.

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Jesus is the only way, John 14:6

When Jesus declares that He is the way, the truth, and the life, the context makes clear that He means that He is the way to the Father. He further claims that no one comes to the Father except through Him (John 14:6). This fits the rest of John’s Gospel: there, even many of the religious people who believed in the one true God opposed God’s agent; if they were not following God’s heart, how much less those who worship false gods or (like myself before my conversion) no God at all?

 

This claim is a startling and offensive one in our culture, where all truth is often considered relative (except the truth of relativism). But while some truth may be relative, sometimes it matters what one believes: if I drink nitric acid because someone tells me that it is orange juice, there will be consequences to my faulty information. Yet the claim is no more offensive today than it was for the early Christians; had they agreed to the existence of other gods in addition to their own, they would not have faced much persecution in the Roman world. Gentiles did not deny the Jewish God, but often despised Jews and Christians for worshiping him exclusively.

 

The claim is also painful. Many people we love do not know Christ; half the world has never even had the gospel explained to them. But the painfulness of a claim need not make it untrue. That tens of thousands of people die daily from malnutrition and preventable diseases is catastrophic, but we do the world no good by denying its reality; instead we must pour our resources into meeting those needs. In the same way, if Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s heart, we must devote our labors to making that available to spiritually needy people that God created for fellowship with Himself. We do this by sharing our faith (both with our lips and with lives consistent with our testimony), directly with with those around us, and less directly by supporting our fellow laborers who share God’s love in Christ among those who have not heard it.

 

Some people object that all religions are the same regarding “what matters.” Unfortunately, such an objection is offensive to most religions, because it waters down what matters to them. One religion says that Jesus is God’s Son; another says that God has no son. Some religions say that there is only one God; others that there are many gods; others still that everything is god. While such distinctions may not matter to outsiders, they matter to practitioners of these faiths. Tolerance and kindness are necessary virtues, but genuine tolerance means that we get along (and, according to Christian teaching, love our neighbor) even when we disagree, not that we always agree. Many who want to make all religions the same are unwilling to tolerate the differences!

 

When John’s Gospel claims that Jesus is the only way to the Father, it is not saying that no one else has any truth. It does, however, claim that Jesus is the only way to a completely saving, personal relationship with the Father. The apostolic message throughout the New Testament preaches as if our eternal destiny depends on our response to God’s offer of a relationship with Himself in Christ. If we genuinely believe that claim, we will live in such a way as to devote our lives and resources to making Christ known.

 

This article is adapted from Craig’s 2004 article in the Missionary Seer; Craig has also authored The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).